U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and DWR Release Draft Species-by-Species Analysis
From the California Natural Resources Agency:
On April 30, 2015, Governor Brown announced California WaterFix, part of a plan to improve California’s water infrastructure and secure California’s water future. California Water Fix would guard against water supply disruption for over 25 million Californians by securing the state’s primary water delivery system against seismic risk and the increasingly extreme weather expected with climate change.
On January 15, 2016, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) released a working draft of the biological assessment for the California WaterFix. A biological assessment is required to obtain incidental take authorization under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). The document presents an assessment as to whether California WaterFix meets the ESA’s specified standard (“likely to adversely affect listed species or their critical habitat”), due to any component of the project, including construction-related activities, or as a result of operations and maintenance. The biological assessment also proposes mitigation, monitoring, adaptive management, and other actions DWR and Reclamation may take to ensure that California WaterFix will avoid, minimize, or compensate for the potential impacts resulting from incidental take of listed species and habitat loss. The document was developed by DWR and Reclamation in close collaboration with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
Section 7 of the ESA requires a federal agency, in consultation with NMFS and USFWS, to document whether its action would jeopardize the continued existence of a species listed under the federal ESA or adversely modify or destroy designated critical habitat for those species. The biological assessment provides the basis for consultation with NMFS and USFWS under the ESA to determine whether California WaterFix meets this standard. Once the biological assessment preparation is completed, it will be transmitted to NMFS and USFWS with a request for consultation. NMFS and USFWS then make a determination related to the project’s potential jeopardy to species and may issue a biological opinion reflecting this determination.
The biological assessment presents a species-by-species analysis of the project’s potential effects and must make a “likely to adversely affect” determination for each federally listed species even when the impacts are small – potential harm to one fish, for example – or nearly negligible, and notwithstanding the fact that the overall project effect to that particular species is beneficial. Therefore, the species-by-species effects determinations in this draft biological assessment do not describe the net environmental benefits of California WaterFix, which as described in the proposed action include:
- Improving environmental flows;
- Avoiding water diversions at times and locations harmful to fish; and
- Creating a more natural flow pattern in the south Delta.
Complete working draft Biological Assessment, Appendices and Figures
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